Monthly Archives: May 2010

I think I wrote about this subject a long time ago, but it came back to me the other day whilst playing a stupidly long game of Monopoly with my son (one that uses pretend credit cards rather than real Monopoly money). Almost every smartphone screen is smaller than a credit card. I suspect that many of you, like me, spend a great deal of time looking at your smartphone and I cannot quite figure out the logic of doing so.

Obviously a small size means portability, but when you step away it sounds crazy. To spend so long staring at something so small goes against how a human being is designed and we should surely be making things less portable to make them more comfortable. What is even more amazing is the fact that we can do so much in relative comfort in a couple of square inches of space.

I can now play good quality arcade games, view presentations, read books and even navigate in a couple of inches of space. It is remarkable in so many ways, but even more so because despite the absurdity of the whole idea, we embrace it as if it were perfectly natural.

HTC released the HD2 and we all proclaimed how large the phone and the screen were, but it is tiny compared to any other piece of equipment we use every day. Every smartphone has a tiny screen, of that there is no doubt, but there seems to be a point where we feel comfortable. From the iPhone down to a low resolution BlackBerry Curve we are comfortable. Take it to a smaller level and things seem too small to be useful. Maybe it is just what we are used to or maybe there is some scientific fact behind the process. Who knows?

The point of this article? There isn’t one- it is merely an observation.

I often wonder what process smartphone manufacturers go through when designing a new smartphone, and more importantly what influences the design choices they make when deciding to invest a vast amount of money and time in development. This was highlighted to me when I got to spend some time with the Sony Ericsson Aspen and during my time with it, I struggled to understand why a whole series of choices had been made during the design process.

It seems to me that these companies are split in to two groups; those that concentrate on the technical constraints of building a smartphone and those that concentrate on ideas and then try to get around those constraints. Far too many manufacturers believe  that innovation is born from making a feature that already exists better and the other(s) look at building new features and better ways of working into a new phone.

Apple is the obvious candidate when it comes to looking at aspiration over constraints and the iPhone and iPad sum up how well it achieved its goals. When it was announced everyone was talking about it because it was a revolution in terms of how a person interacts with a phone. At the point we were used to styluses and screens that did not work well outdoors. We were used to installing app and upgrading them if we happened to spot that an upgrade was available. We had to input serial number over and over again and had to source music, video and podcasts from lots of different locations. Apple thought about what it wanted to achieve and set about doing it.

It seems to me that the others are not doing this at all and are either happy to follow Apple or to stick with tried and tested formulas that ultimately produce phones that will never capture the imagination. When I look at each of the main manufacturers I see the following-

I have no idea what is going on with Nokia, but there seems to be a hit and hope policy of producing a mountain of phones and hoping that some stick. Nokia produces phones that cover every possible spectrum of the market, but not one is unique. Despite some excellent products, such as the Nokia E72, I cannot see a phone which jumps out as a game changer.

HTC is a difficult one because HTC does innovate in lots of areas. The methods it uses to tweak Windows Mobile and Android are clever and Sense makes each OS much more usable than each is on its own. The hardware is clever and attracts lots of purchasers, but to me there is still a sense that HTC could do more. I firmly believe that HTC has the capability to ‘lead’ the market, but where is the imagination needed to do that?

RIM has produced arguably the best hardware in the market and covers all of the practicality bases; good screens, great battery and super fast performance. However, where is the imagination going forward? If the rumours are true we can look forward to a clamshell device based on current hardware. We can look forward to a slide-out keyboard device based on current hardware and we can look forward to BlackBerry OS6.0. None of this makes me sit up and pay attention.

Palm and HP is an unknown at this time, but I expect to see webOS running on superior hardware. This is without doubt a good combination, but is it enough to compete with the very best? It may well be, but it will be a slow burner for a few more months at least.

You could argue that not every smartphone needs to be a game changer and this is true. I love my BlackBerry and some of the latest HTC devices, but if the development process followed aspirations more than technical barriers we would benefit a great deal. The problem is that the market is now so large that these companies need to mass produce phones that work and risk taking is not part of that philosophy. I can understand this, but if they continue to look at the mass market that exists now rather than creating a new one, they will always be followers. One way to start would be to employ people who are largely ignorant of the technical restraints and let them push thought aspirational ideas that do not seem possible at this time.